Discovery Channel: NASA at 50

The Power of Many

Scott Parazynski has a life most of us can only imagine: high school abroad, Stanford University and Stanford medical school, trained for the 1988 U.S. Olympics Luge Team, SCUBA diver, mountaineer, private pilot. And then there’s his day job: highly regarded NASA astronaut with five space shuttle missions and seven spacewalks on his resume. All before his 47th birthday.

The highlight of his life? Watching his kids grow up.

“I’m kind of nervous about how quickly the years go by,” he confides.

We’re at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and Parazynski has kindly agreed to an interview even though he’s trying to pack a full week into a couple of days before having to undergo back surgery. It’s humbling to realize that even a lean and healthy ace sportsman like Parazynski has medical issues.

He’s looking a bit thinner than the last time I saw him, probably a result of two months climbing Mt. Everest, Earth’s highest peak. I wonder if wanting to summit Everest is an astronaut’s version of a mid-life crisis.

“It was a defining moment in my life on a number of levels,” Parazynski offers.

He explains the process of acclimating to the increasingly thinning atmosphere by camping for a few days at progressively higher altitudes, then climbing back down again before attempting new heights; how you learn to move as quickly as possible through the slippery, dangerous ice falls because they are unavoidable so the only way to minimize risk is to cut how much time you spend there.

“Every time I went up, it was the hardest workout I’ve ever had in my life. Knowing I could push myself to new levels even at my advanced age of 46, was wonderful,” he says.

The defining moment of the expedition came on Parazynski’s last day of climbing. He awoke that morning at Base Camp Three, located within sight of the mountain’s top, with a stabbing pain in his back. “I thought I had just slept on it wrong, figured it was just a simple back strain probably from years and years of running and being a tall person, which was exacerbated by carrying a pack all the time,” he says.

“I might have pressed on despite the pain but I would have compromised the safety of my fellow climbers and might have ended up in a rescue situation. .You don’t want to be at 26,500 feet and have people try to pull you off the mountain. It’s just a very ugly situation. And so, I made the tough call after 59 days on the mountain and dreaming of standing right there -- I could see it; I could see it and taste being on the summit -- was a tough call personally, but I knew I had to turn around.”

“As a mountaineer, I’m measured not so much by my summits, but by my performance, my behavior all the way up the mountain and all the way down. If you’re lucky enough to have a touch-and-go at the summit, that’s great, but I’ve turned away from several summits over my many years of climbing for weather, running out of water, gear problems, what have you. It is important to keep your wits about you so I take some pride in knowing that I can still do that even with the temptation of the summit,” he says.

“I know that there were more than one death on the mountain this year because of people that placed their aspirations above their abilities,” Parazynski adds. “A Korean climber who made the summit but didn’t have enough energy to get down and was rescued, but lost several digits. It’s just not worth it.”

“Knowing that I, even in the hypoxic environment that I was in, could still exercise really good judgment and put team first was a big thing.”

Parazynski says the power of the team is the biggest lesson NASA has learned in its 50 years.

“We talk about space flights and you see crews up on orbit, but each person represents probably 2,000 or 3,000 people behind the scenes designing, building, testing. It’s just an enormous team effort, very similar actually to my Everest expedition,” he says.

“I think that any truly great accomplishment in life it’s never done by a single person. It’s always a team effort.”

Scott blogged about his Everest expedition and kept in touch with NASAWatch’s Keith Cowing who turned the talks into podcasts and weblogs.

How NASA Lost its Snap

I have to admit to feeling a bit flummoxed every now and then by a device intended to improve my quality of life -- like the television remote control. I’m looking at a blank screen because when I hit the power button, the TV blinks on, but the content supposedly streaming through the cable in my wall is nowhere to be found.

Being human -- i.e. occasionally stupid and irrational -- I try the on/off button a bunch more times, then punch in a couple of combinations using some colored tabs perched like crown jewels at the top of the remote before giving up. Not worth it, I decide, even if I am curious how NBC followed the devotion of its entire Friday night news broadcast to Tim Russert’s death with coverage Sunday morning on “Meet the Press,” which Russert hosted before his sudden demise on Friday.

Staying on the edge is something I find myself less inclined to be concerned with as I approach 50. (Wasn’t it easier and less stressful to just walk across the room and turn a dial, or am I just being nostalgic? Now when we can’t handle our electronics, we wonder if it’s time to get screened for Alzheimer’s) Yet for NASA, losing snap is the kiss of death.

“I think we made a fundamental mistake of national policy back in the ‘60s as we were doing the moon landings and in the early ‘70s in the Nixon administration when we took NASA out of the exploration business -- not that getting to and from low-Earth orbit isn’t important -- it is -- but it isn’t the only thing that was important," NASA's administrator Mike Griffin tells me.

We're talking about the agency turning 50 and how the experiences of its younger days might prepare it for the challenges ahead. Mike reached the milestone nine years ago this year. My number's coming in a bit more than two.

“I believe that government agencies like NASA, like the National Institute of Health, like the National Science Foundation, belong on the frontier -- their own individual frontier, " he continues. "NASA belongs on the space exploration frontier. Taking us out of lunar exploration, shutting off possibilities for voyages to Mars, confining the agency to low-Earth orbit was a mistake.”

Griffin became NASA’s head three years ago when the agency was just beginning a transition triggered by the 2003 loss of space shuttle Columbia and its crew. The investigation and subsequent report set off a national discussion about the purpose of the U.S. space program. The verdict was to retire the shuttle fleet after it completed construction of the International Space Station and move on to a new spaceship that could travel to the moon and other destinations, as well as operate in low-Earth orbit.

“The shuttle program has been the recipient of a lot of praise and a lot of criticism, both of them probably justified,” Griffin says. “It’s an enormously capable vehicle and yet, it has not lived up to its goals. But that is kind of irrelevant: if the shuttle were a perfect machine, we would still need to move on because the shuttle is inherently limited in terms of its ability to fly to and from low-Earth orbit and do only that.

“NASA’s and the nation’s future in space does not lie in being confined to low-Earth orbit,” he adds. “Given that a government program is not going to have multiple systems -- I mean if I could have a system optimized for low-Earth orbit and another optimized for exploration, that’d be great, but no one’s going to give us that money -- then in my view, it’s a strategic imperative to have a vehicle which can get us out beyond low-Earth orbit. But to have a vehicle like the shuttle, even it it’s a perfectly designed vehicle, even if it operates perfectly, if it cannot take us out beyond low-Earth orbit, then we need to move on.”

Though we like to compare things in terms of money, Griffin says finances are not the relevant factors when it comes to defining NASA’s mission.

“We didn’t save money by taking NASA out of the exploration business. We still spent money on NASA. We spent money on having NASA do the wrong things. Now, if policy-makers of that era had thought more carefully about what they were doing and about its long-term consequences, they probably would have reached different decisions.

“I think it is important for senior government policy makers, agency heads including myself, to remember that part of our role is to look outward to the future,” Griffin says. “Most everything that government is involved with deals with today’s problems and today’s issues and that’s as it should be, just as in your own private personal portfolio, most of the money you make is associated with just living. But you have to set aside some money and some time to look toward your future. And government has to set aside some money -- the amount of money NASA gets is almost trivial from a government perspective … half of one-percent (of the federal budget) -- so it’s not so much about the money. It’s about the focus of attention by policy-makers on looking toward the future.”

In its early years, the United States had a clear-cut vision of what it wanted to do in space: land people on the moon. It wasn’t easy and it had never been done before. It was on the edge, pushing the frontier of possibility. Now after decades of idling, NASA is eager to show that 50-year-olds still have snap.

Caption: Mike Griffin with his wife Rebecca, being sworn in as the 11th administrator of NASA by Vice President Dick Cheney on June 28, 2005. White House photo by David Bohrer.

Out of the Abyss

"This is going to sound strange," Mike Leinbach warns me. It’s two days before Discovery’s launch on the 123rd space shuttle mission. That means there are just 10 flights left before the program ends. Leinbach, the shuttle launch director, is in his office at the Kenendy Space Center, looking out at the seaside launch pads.

Despite the cavet, Leinbach doesn’t mince words when he tells me what he thinks has been NASA’s greatest accomplishment during his 24-year tenure.

“I hate to relate to accidents in a positive way because they obviously aren’t … weren’t,” Leinbach begins. “I remember Challenger. I was standing out there on the mobile launch platform. I had pretty much just hired in so I didn’t understand the flight regime, but then for Columbia, I was launch director for Columbia.

“To see the agency and the astronaut corps bounce back from those catastrophes I think is probably the highlight,” he says. “That we were able to rebound from them because it was so devastating, as you know. It was just so devastating.”

Like many 50-somethings, Leinbach’s affinity for space dates back to NASA’s earliest years. He remembers being on a car trip with his family at age 8 and his dad pulled off the road and turned on the radio. “We’re going to hear history be made today,” Leinbach recalls his dad saying. It was May 5, 1961, and Alan Shepard was blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the first American in space.

“At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, other than ‘That’s kind of cool,’ but when I look back on it, I firmly believe that’s what got me hooked into the space business -- at the age of 8,” Leinbach says. “My love of the agency goes back a long, long way.”

It’s a relationship that has preserved in good times and bad. “There were some really dark times,” Leinbach recalls. After the 1986 Challenger accident, for example, NASA just wanted to press ahead, not look at what had gone wrong, literally bury the issue -- and the wreckage.

When tragedy struck again in 2003 with the loss of Columbia, Leinbach, now a senior manager, recognized an opportunity. He spearheaded a program to make salvaged hardware from Columbia available to researchers.

“I don’t know whether it was a result of a shift in the country’s attitudes or a conscious decision on NASA management’s part to get out in front of the public with the facts of the accident as best we knew them,” Leinbach said. “It was much more open: ‘Here’s what we did wrong; Here’s what we did right’ as opposed to ‘We’re going to forget about that and move on.’ ”

“We’re always kind of held up as these stodgy engineers who have no emotion,” he added. “We do. We have emotion.”

I ask him if NASA is ready to take on more daunting risks, like going to the moon.

“Absolutely, 100 percent,” he assures me.

“Even if it means lose of life?”

“Yes, yes -- as terrible as that sounds,” he says.

“There’s no question that we are America’s explorers. There are other explorers across the country too, but as a government agency, we are the explorers. I really firmly truly in my heart believe that the country wants us to explore. I just wish we did a better job of telling what we do and why we do it.”

Part of the problem, Leinbach explains, is that NASA has gotten out of the exploration business by operating the space shuttles in low-Earth orbit since 1981.

“The shuttle program has done some tremendous things but we’re getting old, a ‘been-there, done-that’ kind of attitude on the public’s part and rightfully so, in part,” he says. “We need to do a better job as an agency of explaining why we’re going back to the moon and on to Mars.”

I take that as an invitation. “And why is that?”

“It’s the human spirit," Leinbach says. "It’s the spirit of adventure and discovery and moving on, moving beyond what you have, wanting more and getting more, whether it’s tangible or philosophical or emotional, just wanting more out of life."

“You know the Mars lander up there now?” Leinbach says. He’s referring to the Phoenix probe, which touched down on the northern polar region of Mars on May 25 to sample the planet’s water and determine if it was ever suitable to support life.

“Just imagine what’s going to happen if we find the evidence of life, past or present,” Leinbach says. “Good lord. That’s what it’s all about. And then one day to send men up there it’d be just outstanding. I hope I’m around to see it.”